Gearboxes and gear arrangements are utilized in a wide range of situations in order to couple drive mechanisms. Traditionally, gearboxes have been formed from gear wheels having appropriate teeth numbers and sizes to provide a desired gear ratio. Gearboxes based on gear wheels may be noisy, making them unacceptable for low noise environments.
More recently, magnetic gearboxes have been provided which comprise respective gear rotors with flux conductors in a radial air gap between the gear rotors. The rotors incorporate permanent magnets, and the flux conductors act to modulate the magnetic flux transferred between the gear rotors.
A magnetic gear offers the potential for a number of significant advantages over its mechanical gear counterpart such as overload protection, quiet operation, high reliability and the potential for high efficiency.
The prior art discloses radial magnetic gear topologies, which are difficult to construct, because of the flux conducting steel poles are made up of small steel segments situated between two rotors.
It is thus an objective of the present invention to design a magnetic gear with low magnetic losses, and which is easy to manufacture.